A Jet Tone Production

Four words from the late nineties that laid out a thrilling paradigm of city life soaked in the neon-lit photography of Chris Doyle & a tantalisingly eclectic pop soundtrack. For me, the films of Wong Kar-Wai still represent those potential possibilities of urban living. And although I've yet to meet a hitman who's the object of unrequited passion, a cop so quite obsessed by tinned pineapple, or even a Chinese femme fatale in a blonde wig, I'm still holding out for such encounters. The city is where it happens. As Dylan Moran once said, it's just a much more likely place for conversation and cafes. Galleries, cinemas, theatres, museums and delicatessens too, come to that. That's not at all to say the countryside is bereft of meaning (it's sublime in Poussin's history paintings, the recent films of Zhang Yimou, and glimpsed fleetingly in dappled roseate sunlight through the dusty windows of a high-speed train), but all that implied hiking & shorts-wearing feels like a strange lack of imagination when you can have 37 types of falafel and browse insouciantly in a record shop. And when you can eat ice-cream with strangers in the wee small hours as The Cranberries pump out from a 24-hour cafe. Yes, those four words show the way it can be.